Recently, a multiple increase in the repetition rate of swept source lasers has been achieved through optical buffering of low duty cycle swept source lasers. In these arrangements, kilometer length and possibly multiple instances of fiber delay lines are typically utilized to achieve the appropriate optical buffering. When implementing buffering schemes greater than 4×, the length and number of fiber delay lines can become tedious to implement and difficult to manage. Swept source lasers for OCT imaging have been demonstrated with up to 16× buffer schemes. (See, e.g., Wolfgang Wieser et al., “Multi-Megahertz OCT: High quality 3D imaging at 20 million A-scans and 4.5 GVoxels per second”, Optics Express, Vol. 18, Issue 14, pp. 14685-14704 (2010)).
Accordingly, there may be a need to address at least some of the deficiencies described herein above.